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Part One. VII International Congress of the Film Language Latin American Systemic Functional Linguistic Association

"FROM GENRE TO CLAUSE: SFL CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE 1. From ‘the silents’ to Seinfeld STUDY OF LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY" 2. Film Language and Audio 3. Ken Loach Description: two genres in one. 4. A challenge Christopher Taylor University of Trieste

Hypothesis: the existence of ‘filmese’ Silent movies

• Film language is a genre in itself, in that the • From the days of the Magic Lantern, silent language written in film scripts and then films needed verbal assistance of some kind, performed by actors differs from everyday and this was provided (partly) by dialogue. • (Taylor, 1999, Pavesi, 2005, Quaglio, 2009, INTERTITLES Forchini, 2010)

The graphics of intertitles Intertitles

• Forerunners of subtitles (on cardboard • Multimodal texts within multimodal texts placards), used for example in • Written language integrated with film in terms Uncle Tom’s Cabin of layout and verbal and non-verbal content.

No emotive or dramatic effects (no appraisal)

Eliza pleads with Uncle Tom to go away

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… and then along came talkies

• Film is a complex semiotic event • In everyday conversation, much language use is in fact formulaic in nature, and much ordinary talk is humdrum and banal, whereas the time and space constraints of films, and the need to relate interesting, exciting or engaging stories, leads to an excess of highly pertinent, dramatic or intriguing exchanges.

Ordinary spoken language phatic devices discourse markers fillers interjections hesitations false starts etc.

Brief Encounter Brief Encounter 2

• Brief Encounter (1946) is director David Lean's • The screenplay was adapted and based on brilliantly-crafted, classic British masterpiece. playwright Noel Coward's 1935 short one-act It is one of the greatest romantic tearjerkers of (half-hour) stage play Still Life. all time, with a very downbeat ending. The • The film still maintains chaste minimalism. romantic couple includes a wife/mother (stage actress ) looking for escape from her humdrum life and sterile marriage, and a dashing doctor ( in his third film).

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Brief Encounter 6 Maconie 2 Stuart Maconie

• “Two nice middle-class people, married but • Perhaps the greatest British film ever made. not to each other, have an unconsummated love affair after a chance meeting at a railway station. She gets and he goes off to South Africa.”

Video Brief Encounter Brief Encounter 3

• Laura (speaking about Dolly to herself): I wish I could trust you. I wish you were a wise, kind friend, instead of a gossiping acquaintance I've known casually for years and never particularly cared for. I wish, I wish... Dolly: Fancy him going all the way to Africa. Is he married? Laura: Oh yes. Dolly: Any children? Laura: Yes. Two boys. He's very proud of them. Dolly: Is he taking them with him, his wife and children I mean? Laura: Yes, yes he is. Dolly: Well I suppose it's sensible in a way, rushing off to start anew in the wide open spaces and all that sort of thing. But, ha, ha, wild horses wouldn't drag me away from England and home and all the things I'm used to. I mean, one has one's roots after all, hasn't one? Laura: Oh yes, one has one's roots.

Laura John Sessions

• “I stood there trembling right on the edge, but • Only the most cold-hearted, Ray-ban wearing, I couldn’t. I wasn’t brave enough. I should like Face reading, post-modern cynic could to be able to say that it was the thought of possibly not be moved by her. you and the children that prevented me but it wasn’t. I had no thoughts at all, only an overwhelming desire not to feel anything ever again. Not to be unhappy anymore…”

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Celia Johnson Filmese – The Rope (Hitchcock) • ‘going up north for four weeks’ location at A Well, come on, we don’t have too much time. some horrible railway station’ Mrs. Wilson will be comng back soon. B I didn’t forget. I have her key. I told her I have lost mine. How are you going to explain this’ A I am not. (polished and rehearsed)

Video Seinfeld Seinfeld - ‘The Revenge’ • LEVITAN: Remind me to tell you what we did in Lake George. Get this … I got it all on video. (laughing) • GEORGE: That’s it. This is it. I’m done. Through. It’s over. I’m gone. Finished. Over. I will never work for you again. Look at you. You think you’re an important man. Is that what you think? You are a laughing stock. You are a joke. These people are laughing at you. You’re nothing! You have no brains, no ability, nothing!. I quit!

Film language How is a film text read?

Return to hypothesis: • Films can be read at three levels (Monaco, 2009) • The ‘context of situation’ of a film is an ‘artificially produced situation’ (APS) and does not totally reflect • Physiological a real situation, however much a director strives for • Mental that effect. • Psychological • It is “written to be spoken as if not written”

• It is ‘filmese’.

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Physiological Santiago Araújo

• Efficient and extensive saccadic patterns • “the positive influence of subtitling in • Follow camera movement, etc, as director wished. language teaching is not unanimously • How viewers view dynamic scenes upheld”… • … “the contribution of subtitled film to foreign language teaching has not been sufficiently tested.”

• Certainly not in terms of CLIL – my next job.

AD: cosa audio-descrivere? AD: cosa audio-descrivere?

Tempi di lettura e rilettura Mental

• Needs experience and knowledge to understand cultural and visual conventions.

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Kramer versus Kramer Psychological

• Integrate all sets of meaning (physiological, • We didn’t have the Mets, but we had the Brooklyn mental, cultural,…). Dodgers, we had Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field. • Films are understood through a multiple semiotic barrage. • Non avevamo i motorini, ma avevamo i monopattini, le pistole a schizzo e non a laser.

• Equivalent effect

The Loach Style The Loach Style 4

essential extra-linguistic information from the dialogues based on spontaneous visual – through the use of ‘symbols’; conversation; e.g., bleak council estates, conditions of poverty, poor clothing, etc. in casual talk speakers effect a semantic activity, a continuous process of construction and negotiation of meaning… characters thus interact in habitual and informal contexts and discuss everyday … but they do it subconsciously. matters: work, family, friendship, etc.

Eggins and Slade (1997) Amateur actors

The paradox (of casual conversation) lies in Since his early experience in television Loach has tried to use amateur or semi-professional actors because the fact that casual conversation is the type of “they don’t think technically and give themselves talk in which we feel most relaxed, most completely to the film without questioning.” spontaneous and most ourselves, and yet They are often actually unemployed people, women casual conversation is a critical site for the whose children have been taken into care, ex social structure of reality. alcoholics, etc. who are allowed to create dialogue around the script, in the search for the “right balance between scripted dialogue and life”

Acting means REacting

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Amateur actors 3 But all this begs the questions…

Loach’s dialogues are consequently rich in colourful expressions, proverbial usage, colloquialisms and language variety in the IS IT REALLY REAL? form of dialectal expressions and regional accents.

“If yer a worker it rains stones seven days a week”

experiment Loach vs. Cobuild Discourse Cobuild corpus Loach films The use of the following discourse markers in markers Loach films (My name is Joe, Raining Well 246 220 Stones, The Navigators) and in the Cobuild But 366 230 corpus was subjected to comparison. So 342 210 Now 120 80 Well, but, so, now, then, You know, I mean Then 162 105 You know 264 240 I mean 192 170

Loach vs Cobuild Insert video Raining Stones

400 350 300 well 250 but so 200 now 150 then 100 you know 50 I mean 0 Cobuld loach

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Raining Stones - script Raining Stones - transcription

Anne - What’s up? What’s up? Bob - Nothin. Nuthin. Anne - Then what you snappin’ for? What yer snappin’ at me fo? …… …… Anne - I told you last night it’d be summat liike that. I told yer last nigh it was gonna be summat li tha. Something’s wrong, isn’t it? What is wrong with you? Bob - I’ve had the van nicked. I’ve had the van nicked.

Language varieties Language varieties 2

Dialect Dialect Sociolect Sociolect gradual Film language script Film language transcription dilution Dubbing Translated film language (dubbing/subtitling) Subtitling

Language varieties 3 Language varieties 4

Dialect Dialect

Sociolect Sociolect specific localisation Film language to Film language foreignisation generic neutralisation Dubbing Dubbing

Subtitling Subtitling

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BUT Forchini 2010 A challenge – The America Movie Corpus – The Longman Spoken American Corpus

Study of ‘real movie data’, i.e. transcriptions of films not scripts.

– applying Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis

Forchini ‘you know’

• “… both face-to-face and movie conversation • The expression ‘you know’ appears in both are informal, non-narrative, situation- domains though occurences are higher in the dependent and not highly persuasive. spoken corpus (0.35%) than in the movie corpus Consequently, since these are all factors linked (0.15%). But it has extremely similar patterning. to the spontaneous nature of conversation (cf. • More interestingly, ‘you now’ is the most Biber, 1998), it can then be concluded that frequent 2-gram in both domains. also movie language has a significant amount • And 20 out of the 30 most frequent 2-grams in of spontaneity.” movies correspond to the spoken language data.

Film genre And now

• Multidimensional analysis shows that “comedies have 3 dimensions out of 5 in Audio Description common with face-to-face conversation whereas non-comedies have 2.” Briefly AD is the process that “transforms visual information into words, • Thus discrepancies can still be detected but transforms the visual into spoken language, the question is not as clear-cut as we once completing in this way the sounds and dialogues of films”. thought. (Lopez Vera, 2006: 1)

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Plan via

1. AD features; 1. Little Dorrit; 2. What the end-user wants; 2. Bianco, Rosso e Verdone; 3. Translation or start from scratch; 3. The Dead Poets Society; 4. Different perceptions; 4. The Pear Tree Project; 5. Where do we go from here? 5. ADLAB.

Video Little Dorrit Little Dorrit

• 1808 Marshalsea Debtors Prison (+ subtitle)

• The doctor shows the baby to a boy and girl

• Old discs spinning on lengths of thread in the darkness – (list of names) BBC Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

• 21 years later

Little Dorrit (cont.) Bianco Rosso e Verdone (video)

• A neatly dressed man in his 20s with short brown hair unlocks a small wooden door. • Wearing a smart grey dress and white pinafore, a straw bonnet and light blue cape, Amy climbs through the door carrying a wicker basket and walks into the busy streets outside. • She passes a horse-drawn carriage and two men in top hats on their way across a bridge. • A tiny figure dwarfed by its enormity.

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Experiment Questionnaire

The experiment was designed to gauge the • Four sections with questions on efficacy of a professional audiodescription on end-users. • A. the general assessment of the film; 1. Rittmeyer Insitute for the Blind, Trieste. • B. the assessment of the audiodescription; (subjects young and suffering other disabilities); • C. the visual details; 2. Union of the Blind, Pordenone. (subjects adult, educated and not suffering from • D. the general understanding of the film. other disabilities); 3. Seeing students as control group in normal conditions and with AD only.

Example: Example: the general assessment of the film; the assessment of the audiodescription • Did you find the film: • Did you find the audiodescription suitable for • very boring this type of film? • boring • not at all • fairly boring • fairly • neither boring nor captivating • neither yes nor no • fairly captivating • very • captivating • very definitely • very captivating

Example: Example: the visual details the general understanding of film

• The lorry driver has: • The person who has just woken up at the • a black beard beginning of the film is: • a long beard • A German emigrant to Italy • a white beard • An Italian emigrant to Germany • a short beard • An Italian who lives in Italy

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Table 1 - visual details

• The yellow lines show the average value function for each answer. • 0 corresponds to an incorrect answer • 1 corresponds to a correct answer

Table 2

• The students (with and without AD) remembered details better, especially those related to colour. • The Rittmeyer blind group fared worst but probably because of age, lack of experience of a ‘seeing’ world and other disabilities.

Comment End users’ comments

• What is interesting about the results of this • Aside from the charts and graphs, the free questionnaire, apart from the help it can give comments of the participants were of great to audiodescribers, is that it is informative in interest. terms of the genre.

• What do the end-users want the AD to be like?

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Comment 1 Comment 2

• As in many films several stories/plots run • Characters appear at the beginning of films parallel. It is necessary to characterise each (eg. the lorry driver) and then appear again, separate thread. often much later, and at various intervals. This could be explained so as to avoid confusion later.

* These are the ‘discontinuous phases’ discussed by Baldry and Thibault.

Comment 3 Comment 4

• It transpired that the level of detail provided • The diktats of AD say that objective was overloaded. In a long film attention description is the name of the game, and in wavers. the case of the man trying to shave by moving • The mention of a teddy bear lying on the bed up and down, the description tells us only this. was, for example, considered superfluous. • An attempt should be made to describe the • The colour of various objects seemed comic element involved. immaterial.

Comment 5 Comment 6

• The lady is called ‘a blonde’, ‘the lady’, the • In the bar scene two Italians are speaking in blonde woman’ and never ‘the wife’. This broad southern accents. It is not clear should be clarified at the beginning. whether this bar is still in Munich or whether • Similarly the man is simply called ‘the man’ the action has shifted to Italy. and when he is called Pasquale by his in the bar, it is not clear who is being addressed.

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The Dead Poets’ Society The Dead Poets Society

• Original ad versus translated version by ‘Senza AD ORIGINALE AD TRADOTTA AD ORIGINALE Barriere’, and Italian company that provides INGLESE IN ITALIANO ITALIANA S.B. PAGINE 33 34 25

audiodescription. PAROLE 6.946 7.176 6.504

CARATTERI 33.918 37.424 32.866 (spazi esclusi)

CARATTERI 40.268 43.975 39.750 (spazi inclusi)

RIGHE 1.014 1.041 1.223

FRASI 755 766 509

Tabella 1. Dati preliminari concernenti le due audio descrizioni, italiana e inglese.

Comment Translator’s comment

• The English version is concise and paratactic, • The translation reads like a translation and while the Italian translation is hypotactic and often the lines spill over the time-code. ‘pompous’, with uneconomic syntactic structures. • • The original Italian version, on the other hand, is By trying to say the same things in Italian, the actually slightly shorter than the original English result is a longer text. version. • Stylistically the temptation is to impose Italian • Is this because translation is a different genre written style (full sentences, correct (there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this is sentences, hypotaxis). the case), or is it a policy of the ‘Senza Barriere’ describers, or is it due to poor describing?

But even the original Italian is more Dead Poets video hypotactic. • A wall painting in muted colours of a class of clear skinned adolescent boys with short haircuts, wearing ties and… sports jackets. In front of the mirror a small boy in his red school cap is having his tie adjusted. A teenage boy wearing a Scottish piper’s cap opens his bagpipes case and carefully fits the pipes together. A black-robed master wielding a camera focuses on the eight year old and his older brother. A bulb flashes.

• Nella penombra di un austero salone di un college, dalle pareti affrescate con scene di vita quotidiana e religiosa diversi studenti, sorvegliati da alcuni professori alteri, si stanno preparando per una cerimonia. Con loro le mascotte: due bambini accuditi dalla mamma. Un allievo estrae la zampogna dalla sua valigetta, mentre un signore - che impugna una macchina fotografica - si rivolge ai due bambini.[…]

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and Proper names

AD ORIGINALE AD TRADOTTA AD ORIGINALE INGLESE IN ITALIANO ITALIANA S.B. • [...]Shadows of boys are moving downstairs. A light NOMI KEATING 68 KEATING 67 KITING* 38 + JOHN PROPRI 2

from a torch throws a shadow on the school mural. In NEIL 107 NEIL 107 NYLL* 51 + PERRY 11

his room, Dr Hager hears the barking. The boys silence TODD 65 TODD 65 TÒM* 3 + TÒD* 29

the school dog with biscuits. Hager shines his torch KNOX 60 KNOX 59 NOKS* 33 + OVERSTRIT* 2

down the corridor but sees nothing. [...] CIARLY* 19 + CHARLIE 44 CHARLIE 44 DALTON 6

• Poco dopo, quando tutte le luci sono state spente, una CAMERON 34 CAMERON 35 CHEMERUN* 4 + CHEMERUM* 9

fila di ombre scivola lungo le pareti delle scale; il MEEKS 28 MEEKS 28 MIKS* 16

gruppo di giovani attraversa i locali del refettorio. PITTS 26 PITTS 25 PITZ* 9 NOLAN 29 NOLAN 24 NOLAN 5

Zittito il cane con un pugno di biscotti, continua la fuga, MR. PERRY 24 SIGNOR PERRY 24 SIGNOR PERRY 0

mentre il professor Mecalister, insospettito, esce a MRS. PERRY 2 SIGNORA PERRY SIGNORA PERRY 0 1 controllare sul corridoio, munito di torcia. […] MCALLISTER 10 MCALLISTER 10 MECALISTER* 6

Comment Pronouns

• Where a proper name is regularly repeated in English, Italian practice is to use a personal pronoun (eg. Keatinglui/egli), or zero anaphora (eg. Keating entra in classe Entra in classe), or a PRONOMI HE 879 LUI 20 LUI 9 PERSONALI title (es. KeatingIl professore) or a generic term SHE 25 LEI 7 LEI 5 (es. Keatingl’uomo). EGLI 0 EGLI 4

ELLA 0 ELLA 0

• However, in translation, the proper names appear in similar numbers. • Is this slavish intervention?

Comment Surplus information

• Interestingly, when the analysis turns to • Todd’s eyes widen as he scans the photos. pronoun use, the original English and the translation differ markedly: English uses • Davanti alla bacheca con i trofei [Todd] aveva personal pronouns to a great extent while fissato a lungo una foto che gli rassomigliava: both the Italian translation and the original forse era il fratello Jefry. Italian practically ignore them. • In front of the trophy cabinet (Todd) has stared • Italian prefers to join clauses, or resort to zero for a long time at a photo that resembled him: anaphora. perhaps it was his brother Jeffrey.

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But - details gestures

• The English and Italian ADs differ in relation to • In the grounds outside, younger boys throw detail: their arms round their mothers’ necks, some • The English version goes into great detail over weeping. the characters, the clothes they wear, their personal effects, their appearance and their • I ragazzini salutano i genitori. gestures. • The boys wave to their parents

Interpretation Conclusion

• Knox’s mouth drops opened as he stares at the • Better to start from scratch till guidelines, young blonde girl in a white mohair sweater both general and for translation, are put in who opens the door. place.

Una donna, giovane e carina, si para davanti • Which brings me to …. agli occhi sbalorditi di Overstrit. A woman, young and pretty, appears before Overstrit’s startled eyes.

The Pear Tree Project (SFL) (Martin, Matthiesen & Painter, 1997)

• SFL analysis conducted to ascertain whether An SF grammar is “a grammar that respects there exist: the speakers’ right to make up their own • (a) different perceptions and different minds about how they choose to talk (or approaches to describing audiovisual material write): at the same time it makes speakers across different languages/cultures; explicitly aware of the choices they have • (b) differences of this type within the same available, so they can make an informed language/culture; decision about the options they choose.” • (c) how this might impact on the practice of audio description for the blind and partially sighted.

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Trieste 2 topics

• In addition to the survey of the different nationalities, a • theme choice and development second Italian test was carried out in Trieste. • The findings of the separate Trieste survey are to be • clause type seen in the light of the wider aim of the whole Pear Tree Project, which was to assess, as explained above, • appraisal whether cross-linguistic or cross-cultural differences across Europe were statistically significant or not. • The findings of the Trieste investigation would be compared to those of the other nationalities, but also to the other Italian group, to see whether the observable differences or similarities were in any way culture bound.

Theme choice (Trieste 2) Theme breakdown

• 1. The song of the rooster. (Canto del gallo) • 2. We are in the open countryside, … (Siamo in aperta campagna, …) • NOUN: 11 • 3. The video opens on a countryside scene: (Il video si apre con una scena campestre:) • PRONOUN (1st person) 2 • 4. We are in the countryside. (Siamo in campagna.) • 5. It is early in the morning a pearpicker has already filled three baskets, (È’ • mattina presto, un raccoglitore di pere ne ha già raccolte quasi tre ceste,) PLACE ADJUNCT 4 • 6. A rural scene, … (Scena rurale,) • 7. A farmer picks some pears from a tree and puts them in three baskets at the • TIME ADJUNCT 2 bottom of the tree. (Un contadino raccoglie pere dall'albero e le mette in tre ceste poste ai piedi dell'albero.) • ‘THERE IS’ 1 • 8. The scene opens on a landscape, … (La scena si apre con l'inquadratura di un paesaggio,) • 9. In the countryside a man is picking some pears from a tree, … (In una campagna un contadino sta raccogliendo le pere da un albero,) • 10. The video opens on a countryside scene. (Il video si apre con una scena campestre.)

nouns other themes the picker 2 A farmer; A man • place adjuncts 4 the rooster’s song 1 • time adjuncts 2 the film/video/scene 4 • ‘There is'. 1 simple noun phrases 4 eg., A rural landscape Pronoun (We) 2 • This breakdown in English reflects the original Italian pattern exactly, in that there are no forced translations, except for the very first sentence in which the song is thematised in Italian and a more natural version in English might have read ‘A rooster crows’, thematising the bird, but here the rules of comparative syntax come into play.

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Theme choices across languages

THEME A E C Fl Fr Ge Gr Ir It P S A man 7 12 6 8 7 9 2 10 5 3 5 • A similar breakdown was then observed film 6 3 1 5 3 0 2 4 10 7 7 Allusion to film 0 0 3 1 1 0 0 2 1 2 1 regarding the English transcription of the There is 4 2 2 1 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 Time adjuncts 2 0 4 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 It is… 1 0 1 0 2 0 1 0 0 1 3 eleven groups in the project (Afrikaans, I 1 1 0 1 0 0 4 3 0 0 1 We 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 You 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 English, Catalan, Flemish, French, German, A farmer 1 1 2 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 The story 0 0 0 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 Greek, Irish, Italian, Polish and Spanish). The A cock 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 Someone 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 A boy 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 theme choice in the first clause was thus The most 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 noticeable thing Pears 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 elicited from 213 texts. A hispanic pear 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 picker

Most favoured theme choices Significant differences

• A man Afrikaans 4 existential clauses • A film/video/scene • (totally absent in 5 groups) Spanish predicated theme ‘It is…’ Catalan most time adjuncts Irish most place adjuncts Greek and Irish personal pronouns

Individual theme selections Differences

Polish Pears… • Culture bound? Irish The most noticeable thing… • Linguistically determined? Spanish A Hispanic pear picker… • Random personal choices?

• And what does this mean for audio description research?

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THEME CHOICE in the AD of ‘The English Patient’ Cf. Trieste

• Nouns and noun groups 302 • In percentage terms, the noun and pronoun • Circumstantial themes in the audio description accounted for 72%, roughly the same as in the Trieste • adjuncts of Time 38 sample, whereas there were no non-finite • adjuncts of Manner 26 clause themes in the latter. • adjuncts of Place 62 • Pronouns (3° person) 239 • Non finite clauses 77

Cf. country for country Non-finite clauses

• Looking at the larger picture, in all 213 texts • It would seem that this particular grammatical the theme choice for the first clause was a construct is specific to audio description and noun or pronoun in 169 cases, almost 80 % not to simple off-line descriptions such as and therefore broadly similar to the other those resulting from the Pear Tree Project. findings. Looked at country for country, there is again close proximity in the use of nouns • Or they simply don’t occur in initial clauses. and pronouns as themes, at least for the opening clauses. There were, however, no non-finite clause themes.

Warning But…

• This is, however, a minor warning sign that, in • this is not enough to invalidate further some respects, descriptions and audio investigation and, indeed, the next stage in descriptions are different sub-genres, and not the analysis was to observe all the theme all variables are comparable. choices in all the clauses in all the twenty texts in two sets of examples, namely the randomly selected Flemish group and the first Italian group.

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Theme choice in the Flemish and Italian Pear Film samples

When the total number of words is taken into account, we see that the Flemish students wrote Theme Noun 3° person Time Place Reason 2° person 1° person There Manner type s pronouns adjts adjts adjts pronouns pronouns is/are adjts a great deal more than either of the Italian groups. In fact the twenty Flemish texts totalled

Flemish 247 388 166 18 12 11 11 9 6 7,522 words while the first Italian texts totalled only 4,426 words (interestingly, the other Italian

Italian 97 145 113 18 4 3 1 4 group from Trieste totalled a broadly similar 4,733 words). When this discrepancy is factored in, some differences and some similarities can be observed.

Cf. audio description of ‘The English Findings Patient’ • Both groups favour nouns and pronouns as • In the actual audio description of ‘The English Patient’ the number of nouns is greater than the theme in roughly similar proportions, whereas number of pronouns, whereas in the Pear Film the Italians tend to use more time and place descriptions it is the pronouns that predominate. adjuncts. This could be attributed firstly to the fact that in a short description the use of anaphoric reference through a repeated use of pronouns is sufficiently cohesive and coherent for the receiver. In a two- hour film, with many more characters and scene changes to describe, it may be necessary to use more actual nouns.

An Italian Pear Tree text Cf. Italian with Italian

• This little boy runs away, • Comparing the two sets of data derived from • he meets a little girl on the road, the two potentially homogeneous groups of Italians (the official Pear Tree contingent from • he takes her hat and then, Macerata and the Trieste group) we find the • as he is rushing off, following breakdown. • he falls to the ground.

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Comment

Theme Nouns 3° person Time Place Reason 2° person 1° person There Manner type pronouns adjuncts adjuncts adjuncts pronouns pronouns is/are adjuncts • As can be seen there is a substantial similarity

Italian 97 145 113 18 4 3 1 4 6 in the choice of theme items, particularly as 1 regards the use of the third person pronoun, time and place adjuncts and other pronoun Italian 123 149 101 14 2 2 1 2 0 2 use. There is more of a discrepancy in the choice of nouns as theme but the difference is not great. But again the figures are totals, and the differences registered between Italian and Italian must not be ignored.

Clause/process type Material clauses

• Material clauses are to be expected, given the • Multiple clause sentences such as ‘In a while, series of actions that take place; a little boy with a bicycle passes by; when he • Mental clauses bring the describer into the discourse; sees the pears he stops, (he) gets off his • Relational clauses refer to the situation of being bicycle, (he) puts one basket on the bike and or of possession; then (he) leaves’ are common. • Behavioural clauses involve the verb ‘look’ or equivalents; • Existential clauses eg. ‘there are three boys standing there’

Mental clauses Relational clauses

• ‘I saw a tree standing in a field’ • ‘The first one is a man’ • ‘You can hear an animal crying’ • ‘On his head he has a hat’

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Comment

Clause Material clauses Mental Relational Behavioural Existential clauses type clauses clauses clauses • The breakdown of clause type selection shows

Flemish 604 101 69 50 13 very similar patterns in all cases except behavioural clauses.

Italian 315 55 26 15 7

Comment

Clause Material clauses Mental Relational Behavioural Existential clauses type clauses clauses clauses • Again (taking the respective word counts into Italian 1 315 55 26 15 7 consideration) the figures are very similar.

Italian 351 48 24 23 4 • Again discrepancies are found in behavioural 2 clauses. • But the figures relating to the second Italian set are closer to the Flemish statistics and might indicate that the first Italian set is an exception.

Stats Theme choice

• Chi-square testing was applied to the figures in • With reference to theme choice between the order to check the significance of the differences Flemish group and the first Italian group, the chi- between observed frequencies and theoretical square calculated was much higher than the frequencies. theoretical chi-square, which means that in this • In order to judge whether significant differences case the difference in choice was significant. exist between the variables examined, it is necessary to assess the expected frequency. If the • This would suggest that a Flemish audio describer distribution is similar to that expected, then any should favour a largely nominal approach and difference must be linked to chance and provide fewer thematised adverbial markers than therefore not statistically significant. an Italian describer.

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Clause choice Appraisal

• In the case of the other three comparisons • The describers in the Pear Tree Project, although reported here between the two Italian groups they were not aware that the experiment in which they were participating was designed to and between the Flemish and Italian group provide useful information for audio description regarding clause choice, the chi-square practice, used very few appraisal tools. calculations show no statistical significance. • There was some use of adjectives such as • In this case a Flemish or Italian audio ‘puzzled’, ‘surprised’ and ‘astonished’ and describer could proceed in the same way, adverbs such as ‘unwittingly’, ‘suspiciously’ and ‘indifferently’, but with an absolute maximum of giving the same weight to material, mental two cases per text. Many texts contained no and relational clauses. appraisal at all.

Appraisal? Appraisal - yes

• These observations also showed that the • There is now a groundswell of current opinion limited use of appraisal was spread fairly in favour of some degree of appraisal being evenly across the three groups of students, introduced into audio description, and the indicating no national or cultural preference. results of the Pear Tree Project would seem to support these timid beginnings.

Conclusions Conclusions

• But it is also evident that a number of • It is equally clear that individual choices can variables do not fit neatly into deviate from all the norms with choices like national/cultural/linguistic categories and that ‘Pears’ ‘A hispanic pear picker’ and ‘The most many theme choices are common to all noticeable thing’ occurring only once and in groups. different groups.

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Conclusions Conclusions

• But whatever the final and exact calculations of • A quick look at the figures would point to a few potentially different approaches to audio describing: further research will prove, for example from a the Polish use more detailed descriptions than the study of theme and clause type choices in all of Greeks in that more Poles mention all the objects the clauses of all of the texts and from a involved in the fall scene whereas only a few Greeks do comparison of the themes and clauses selected in so; the English differ from the Italians in their use of verb tense; interestingly the Spanish and the Catalans the original language and those in the differ in their attributing of the causes of the fall. The translations, it would seem that the main aim of Germans and Poles did not use any single noun phrases the Pear Tree Project, that of eliciting strategies in isolation to set scenes, but some members of all the for audio description for all languages, has been other groups do so. The Flemish differ from the Italians useful. in the choice of theme to a significant extent.

Conclusions Impression

• The counterbalancing factor is that the • Thus the overriding impression is that it is not differences recorded between Pole and Pole, possible to formulate any definitive Greek and Greek, Catalan and Catalan, etc. are noticeable enough to be relevant. Even within the national/cultural tendencies, and that seemingly homogeneous results obtained from individual choice, regardless of nationality, is the two Italian groups, it can be seen that one probably a more powerful force. student used twenty-six material clauses in her • Any proposal for the formulation of description and another used seven. One used international guidelines for audio description five relational clauses while the average was nearer to one and a half. would be supported.

ADLAB

• Audiodescription: lifelong access for the blind • European Union project • EACEA - Lifelong Learning • Ersmus Multilateral Projects – cooperation between HEI and Enterprises • This project has been funded with support from the European Commision

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